Long before the DeLorean, there was a Tudor-style mansion, a billiard room and a boy who found the cigar humidor. Hollywood loves a rags-to-riches story. This is the other kind. Long before he became one of cinema’s most beloved eccentrics, a future star spent his early childhood in a house so grand that locals still call it “the castle.”
The star is Christopher Lloyd, 88, forever Doc Brown in Back to the Future (1985) and Reverend Jim on Taxi, a role that won him two Emmys. The house is Waveny, in New Canaan, Connecticut, built in 1912 for his maternal grandfather, Lewis Henry Lapham, a founder of the Texaco oil company. Lloyd revisits that childhood in his memoir, In My Own Time, published by Grand Central on Oct. 27, 2026.
Inside Waveny, “the Castle”
Waveny House was designed by architect William Tubby, with grounds shaped by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. The Lapham family spent summers there, and the estate stretched across hundreds of acres of fields, ponds and woodland.
Lloyd has shared his own memories of the interiors: a billiard room with a humidor, a library with a bronze, lion-shaped inkwell and a grand hall with a limestone fireplace. Speaking at an event at the house in 2017, he recalled taking cigars from the humidor at “seven, eight, nine years old.” When his father caught him, he handed the boy more cigars to smoke in the bathtub. “Ultimately I got very sick. Very sick,” Lloyd said. It cured him of smoking for good. Doc Brown would have called it an experiment.
A Gilded but Complicated Childhood
His mother, Ruth Lapham Lloyd, was a singer. His father, Samuel R. Lloyd Jr., was a lawyer Lloyd once described as “an Edwardian gentleman out of his time.” The memoir is candid that life inside the grand house was far from a fairy tale, and Lloyd reportedly describes a lonely childhood, despite the scale of the place. The family later moved, and he grew up largely in Westport, Connecticut, where he helped found his high school’s theater company.
How the Estate Became a 300-Acre Public Park
In 1967, the Lapham family sold Waveny House and about 300 acres to the town of New Canaan for $1.5 million, after giving it much of the estate land. Lloyd has said his mother wanted it to become a public park. “My mom would be so pleased to see what all of you are doing,” he told supporters in 2017.
Today Waveny Park is a town treasure, with fields, ponds and trails. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2019, and it has even appeared on screen, in the 2004 film The Stepford Wives.
What to Steal From Waveny
You do not need a Tudor castle to borrow its spirit. Give one room a real function, the way a library or billiard room once did. Choose one heavy, beautiful material, stone, oak or brass, and let it anchor the space. Keep a single inherited or vintage object in view, as Julianne Moore does with chairs she bought in Paris in 1995. The lesson worth borrowing is that a house feels grand through character, not square footage. For more TV-era nostalgia, see Richard Kline on John Ritter.
The Bottom Line
Before Back to the Future, Christopher Lloyd grew up on a Connecticut estate built by his Texaco-founding grandfather. Today, that estate is a 300-acre public park, exactly as his mother hoped.
